Did you know they've made a TV series where real politicians pretend Russia is bombing the UK?

TWO TOP RAF pilots have been shot dead, execution-style, outside a pub. People are dying waiting for ambulances thanks to a malware attack on the computer systems of the NHS. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Michael Gove is the prime minister. 

That is the state of play at the outset of The Wargame, a new TV series by Sky that presents a cabinet of real politicians with the threat of war with Russia. As you might imagine, this conceit poses a few very important questions. Chief among them: how is this allowed?

This reality TV show game is not being played by random people off the street. Penny Mordaunt was Secretary of State for Defence in recent memory! Michael Gove was a co-leader of the highly consequential campaign to leave the EU! Nicola Sturgeon was in charge of Scotland until 2023! The rest of the cast is rounded out by UK politicians who you might have heard of (former chairwoman of the UK’s Covid inquiry Harriet Harman, anybody?) to UK politicians you might not have heard of (Kim Darroch, anybody?… No?).

Nevertheless, The Wargame is quite literally a war game being played by people who, in the very recent past, would have been the exact people who would have to figure it out if there really was a war.

What unfolds over the course of three episodes that have been released (with one more to come) is not what you would call comforting. You know how on The Traitors you might get someone on there who lies about their job in the real world? That’s sort of how it feels when Michael Gove acts as the prime minister. After all, in his role as an architect of Brexit, we are talking about someone who has done more damage to the British public sphere than any imaginary Russian submarine.

“I’m sorry Prime Minister, but I must push you for an answer,” Gove is told by one of his military leaders at one point as he hums and haws over striking a Russian military target. From the get-go, the show gives the impression that the end of the world is going to look like someone playing for £64,000 on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?

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The first episode takes place almost entirely within a cabinet decision room, and the camera cuts quickly back and forth as each of the politicians-turned-TV-personalities says quippy things in their best ‘decisive but measured’ voices. There’s no suggestion of a real conversation taking place; we don’t linger on the agony that these decisions would presumably render in real life. It needs to be fast and frantic to work as television, but ultimately it tells us little about what this would really look like. Which raises the question of why bother having real politicians play the roles?

“What is the nature of the attack we should be preparing for right now?” Sturgeon asks early on, while almost laughing, pointing out that at this point in the game they have very little to go on. That’s how a wargame works, naturally, but the moment breaks the fourth wall and probably aggravates questions already on the viewer’s mind.

How much time did the politicians have to prepare for this? How is this being filmed — do the stars get to chat at length about what’s going on in between takes? Of course the scenario itself is not real, but how real are the performances? What kind of pressure are they under? Are they getting multiple takes to let them sound just the right amount of serious? 

The show only really gets good when the situation gets bad — a few minutes into episode three when the UK is really under attack. At that point, the analytical part of the brain shuts off and curiosity over how real politicians might emotionally respond to mass casualty events on English soil takes over. Jim Murphy, a former leader of the SNP, puts in such an expert turn shaking his head in disbelief as his country crumbles around him that one can only imagine he spent his political career absolutely praying he’d get a chance to bust out a performance like this.

It’s obvious that there is at least some intentionality on the part of the showmakers to impress upon the viewer that this is serious. This could be real. This could happen. But the show faces a paradox.

The more real it is, the more it justifies itself as a product. Its value comes from the idea that this is how such a scenario would really unfold. However, the more real it is, the more ludicrous it becomes. If this is really how the UK would respond to such a threat, then why in the name of god would it be on television? 

In that sense, there’s something that feels self-defeating about The Wargame. Any society where high-level security risks are being gamed out on TV for the masses to half-watch while scrolling on their phones of a weekday evening is a society that is inherently unprepared for the kind of catastrophe that would come with an actual hostile invasion.

Any society where those who were so recently entrusted to represent the interests of ordinary constituents so readily cash in on their own image and status to play war games on TV is a society that already has enough of its own problems to be dealing with.